The PS4 is a monster. It is architected with pretty good performing parts. It has been enhanced by Sony to be highly relevant in game performance and what independant processors there are on-board are there to off-load a whole lot of the not-so-direclty game performance related stuff to make room for it. (Video capture, background downloading, Vita mobile integration, etc etc).

Can you quantify the performance of the PS4 holistically to modern PC -actual- performance (real world)?

How does it compare to the 360 and PS4 vs PC's when they launched in 2006ish?

And that is the real X factor with the PS4 and no one is even asking Sony about it.. Which seems downright bizarre to me when we get inundated with articles about the XBone.. despite the fact that MS themselves haven't mentioned so much as a clock speed to the press. ..How big are the L1, L2 and L3 caches on the CPU? Was SPURS implemented to allow the GPU to read from the chip cache? Can the CPU read/write from the GPU? If that genie gets out of the lamp, there won't just be an architectural advantage for the PS4 anymore. It will be nothing short of a blood bath.

Oh come on Lef, give me some credit, I HAVE asked about it in a another thread, you and I both discussed it, and said it will be a defining factor in these system.

Can you quantify the performance of the PS4 holistically to modern PC -actual- performance (real world)?

How does it compare to the 360 and PS4 vs PC's when they launched in 2006ish?

That's the weird part. It's hard to actually make a comparison. The way developers can design games with a shared pool of GDDR5 is, in and of itself, a pretty big leap over what they can do on PC. For instance, you don't have to lock and unlock memory when making physics calculations against a texture. So, a lot of the stuff you have to cram over PCIe is a moot point in a closed system like PS4.

That being said, these graphics cards you are seeing in PCs these days DO put some distance in raw performance over the new consoles even despite some of these "shortcomings" of gaming PCs architecturally. It's actually more fair to say that they are "performing" like an upper mid-level gaming PC, but capable of running all effects. This is a vast departure from last-gen where the consoles could do some things but you'd have to turn off entire features in the PC version to get similar visuals.

It's an incredibly complex question you are asking. Long story short of it, these consoles, and especially in the case of PS4 do run better than the majority of gamer's PCs. That doesn't mean that an upgraded PC won't stomp the $#@! out of a PS4, though. Then again, you're comparing a home console connected to a 1080P TV that is sitting from the user anywhere from 6ft to 20ft away to a gaming PC that sits a foot or two from your face and may have up to three monitors running at God only knows what resolution.

Apples and oranges.

Originally Posted by mynd

Oh come on Lef, give me some credit, I HAVE asked about it in a another thread, you and I both discussed it, and said it will be a defining factor in these system.

True that, and I certainly wasn't trying to come across as lambasting you. I sometimes forget that I am coming to this forum from the other four I post at and even though some of the debates are similar, the players in them are certainly not. I hope you forgive me.

That's the weird part. It's hard to actually make a comparison. The way developers can design games with a shared pool of GDDR5 is, in and of itself, a pretty big leap over what they can do on PC. For instance, you don't have to lock and unlock memory when making physics calculations against a texture. So, a lot of the stuff you have to cram over PCIe is a moot point in a closed system like PS4.

That being said, these graphics cards you are seeing in PCs these days DO put some distance in raw performance over the new consoles even despite some of these "shortcomings" of gaming PCs architecturally. It's actually more fair to say that they are "performing" like an upper mid-level gaming PC, but capable of running all effects. This is a vast departure from last-gen where the consoles could do some things but you'd have to turn off entire features in the PC version to get similar visuals.

It's an incredibly complex question you are asking. Long story short of it, these consoles, and especially in the case of PS4 do run better than the majority of gamer's PCs. That doesn't mean that an upgraded PC won't stomp the $#@! out of a PS4, though. Then again, you're comparing a home console connected to a 1080P TV that is sitting from the user anywhere from 6ft to 20ft away to a gaming PC that sits a foot or two from your face and may have up to three monitors running at God only knows what resolution.

Apples and oranges.

True that, and I certainly wasn't trying to come across as lambasting you. I sometimes forget that I am coming to this forum from the other four I post at and even though some of the debates are similar, the players in them are certainly not. I hope you forgive me.

So the consoles this time are in a 'weaker' position out the gate than they were last gen, comparatively?

That's my belief as well. Starting out last generation, the games were downgraded from the beginning, this time around they are about the same. the efficiency on the consoles side and the inefficiencies on the PC side are catching up.

a lot of the PC inefficiency comes from the fact that the platform itself is losing value, thus losing its advantage of power due to the fact that games nowadays need to run on all platforms...so they aren't focusing specifically on the PC architecture, thus you can have a game on PC that takes a bunch of video cards to run but really, you should probably just need one of them (and maybe not even that powerful) to run the game if the game wasn't designed with consoles in mind.

Then PC has its own issues such as multiple configurations within its own platform. Basically if they hadn't announced that you definitely need a 64-bit OS to run next-gen games, they wouldn't have been possible on PC...they are forced to make this decision.

Then PC has its own issues such as multiple configurations within its own platform. Basically if they hadn't announced that you definitely need a 64-bit OS to run next-gen games, they wouldn't have been possible on PC...they are forced to make this decision.

This is probably PC's main issue, the multiple configurations. I didn't even realize they announced you'd need 64-bit OSes for next gen multiplats going to PC, that'll definitely help. Still, all the PC fanatics that are laughing at the raw numbers of the next-gen consoles don't realize that even without the consoles here that they claim holds back PC gaming, they wouldn't be getting anywhere near full usage out of their systems due to the huge variety of configurations that developers have to keep in mind and design for in a more general sense. Tons of the top developers are optimizing their engines for AMD cards also, so it might not pay off in the near future to dish out all those bucks for the extra powerful Nvidia cards.

To add to that, developers are really going to start to maximize for multicore performance in their games due to the fact that the CPU pieces in both the PS4 and XBone are relatively low frequency but multiple core architecture. Intel processors have been notorious for their ridiculously strong single-thread performance numbers. AMD has opted to go towards spreading out tasks to multiple cores to create performance gains.

With PCs having six and eight core AMD chips running upwards of 3-4GHz, the performance gains will be noticable with developers actually coding proper multithread. It's going to be a big win-win situation for console gamers and PC gamers will really reap the rewards of these design choices.

True, very good point. More scalable, highly parallel programming will definitely use all our multi-core processors more efficiently. There's so many programs and games that don't really focus on multi-core enough. I happen to have an older Phenom II X4 970, it'd be nice to know it's longevity would be increased a bit from the better use of the 4 cores.

True, very good point. More scalable, highly parallel programming will definitely use all our multi-core processors more efficiently. There's so many programs and games that don't really focus on multi-core enough. I happen to have an older Phenom II X4 970, it'd be nice to know it's longevity would be increased a bit from the better use of the 4 cores.

The lack of multiple core processing is definitely the biggest problem with PCs these days. If programmers started utilizing all those cores, everything would be so much faster and optimized.

This is probably PC's main issue, the multiple configurations. I didn't even realize they announced you'd need 64-bit OSes for next gen multiplats going to PC, that'll definitely help. Still, all the PC fanatics that are laughing at the raw numbers of the next-gen consoles don't realize that even without the consoles here that they claim holds back PC gaming, they wouldn't be getting anywhere near full usage out of their systems due to the huge variety of configurations that developers have to keep in mind and design for in a more general sense. Tons of the top developers are optimizing their engines for AMD cards also, so it might not pay off in the near future to dish out all those bucks for the extra powerful Nvidia cards.

lol sir if you were here 4+ weeks ago, i wouldn't have to waste my time so much here lol. i said the same $#@! and people were like, "eyehhh?"

lol sir if you were here 4+ weeks ago, i wouldn't have to waste my time so much here lol. i said the same $#@! and people were like, "eyehhh?" EDIT: http://www.psu.com/forums/showthread...13-years/page2 There was another thread like this one too...where Foraeli kept arguing about it...they just do not understand the importance of optimization.

I've said the same thing before as well but soon realized I was just wasting my time. lol

What is important architecturally is that the system has GCN 2.0 cores, enhanced and validated VERY HIGH SPEED BUSES, The APU on all sides is verified for GDDR5, and has hUMA implemented (which strangely i have NOT heard about for the XBOne and the Data move engines seem to be there in place of).

What got me was the Raycasted audio. I had extrapolated from the term that the audio wavelets would be fed into the world and affected by calculations against the simulated materials and reflective and absorptive properties. THAT could be really cool!!!
I'm not far off i guess. http://beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=63978

Can you quantify the performance of the PS4 holistically to modern PC -actual- performance (real world)?

How does it compare to the 360 and PS4 vs PC's when they launched in 2006ish?

Honestly, with the GDDR5 bus hooked up to those Jaguars, i'm putting the cpu firmly in high i5 3xxx territory. The GPU is a Radeon 7850 or 6950, depending on if you've owned either of those.
I have an i7 970 and a 6950 2GB and have 24GB of RAM. Honestly, I also have a system roughly twice as powerful as that one too, but, i never saw THAT machine get stressed at 1080p.
Throw in the hUMA memory access and extra CPU bandwidth and optimized code (where games which might run 90fps on a PC put the resources into more details at 60fps) and i feel comfortable saying it's about the same as an i5 with a 7850 and the fastest ram you can put in it, and it can do some things better than the PC for sure.

On the SPURS, yeah, it seems the 64 compute sources for the fine-grain compute of the GPU is the better version of the SPURS.

With the hUMA, I've also been curious about it's inclusion\exclusion in the Xbone. There's no real verification that it is in there. They have the fully unified ram, but I'm not sure they've done the kind of customizations that PS4 has done in the whole ram-CPU-GPU relationship to make it more like the AMD APUs that will come out next year.

On the raycasted audio, I assume the audio processor chip that handles the cross-game chat and 200 concurrent mp3 streams in-game will help with the output of that. It makes me want to get a surround sound setup going.

however good the ps4 gpu may be , ps4 and xbox are going to start looking outdated to mid to high powered pc's in just a couple of years. they are not too powerful out of the gate to keep up with pc for too long.

however good the ps4 gpu may be , ps4 and xbox are going to start looking outdated to mid to high powered pc's in just a couple of years. they are not too powerful out of the gate to keep up with pc for too long.

I could put together a PC today that would stomp a mudhole in them, but what's important in terms of PC gaming is where everyone else's machine performs (from a development aspect). Games like Crysis 1 are more of the exception than the rule in PC gaming in that developers tend not to pour resources on a game that can only really be run at full settings by the uppermost 5-10% of the playerbase.

It's not so much that PCs a year from now will be so much better. There will certainly be a GeForce 800 and a 900 series before too long. What really matters is that the PS4 has enough fill-rate and hardware features to be relevant to the game developers years from now. The hardware may be far more powerful in PC, but when will we move to DirectX 12? Will there be an actual change in the hardware needed for it? Does PS4 have a hardware tesselator? Yes, it does. It also has a megaton of GCN 2.0 compute units and a robust bus.

Like I had mentioned before. It's not wise to get caught up in the apples to oranges of PC gaming versus console. Those graphics cards are designed to support multiple monitors at very high resolutions because the gamer sits just a foot or two away from the monitor. In contrast, the demand on a console is far different than that

the only thing we can wonder is if the developer studios will really be able to use the technology and not be limited by the game publishers tempted by Microsoft's money to "not do a better game on Playstation" like what happened this gen, I don't have much hope sadly

however good the ps4 gpu may be , ps4 and xbox are going to start looking outdated to mid to high powered pc's in just a couple of years. they are not too powerful out of the gate to keep up with pc for too long.

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